Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Guest Designer Jenn Shurkus - Part 1

I met Jenn when I was on the Sweet Stamp Shop Design Team and I love her designs and her creative ways to express herself. She is a lovely, kind and positive person and I love to read her Facebook posts. She loves her cat just like I love mine, she loves the sea and the summer... we have so much in common. What else do I need to invite a great designer to be our guest? ;)

Here's some info about her:

Jenn lives in New England, with her kitty Mister
Harley and her boyfriend Chris. She's been papercrafting for 15 years,
and has
played multiple roles in the paper craft industry as an independent
store manager, designer and teacher. With a degree in graphic design she
is also Copic and Ranger certified. She is part of the Simon Says
Stamp.com
design team and the Lawnscaping Challenge Design Team. Jenn loves to
show people new and clever ideas to design their cards and projects. She
has a flair for the "artsy-fartsy" without going over the top. She
designs her projects in the way to inspire, but not intimidate. Jenn is
eager to share her creative passions with others and encourage their
artistic growth. She currently is teaching classes with Lawn Fawn, Hero
Arts, Ranger and more. You can read more about her, and her handsome
kitty Mister Harley and wicked cute boyfriend Chris on her blog
{creative chick} http://www.shurkus.com/

Jenn created something I have been waiting for: Project Life Journaling Cards! (Did you know I bought a Project Life "starter kit" - made one... well, let's call it "layout" and dropped the ball? LOL) I looooooove how these turned out! They are so inviting to write down some things that you love about your cat or stupid things that your cat does. (They ALL do stupid thing, don't they?)

What I also love about them is that they were inspired by Jenns gorgeous cat Mr. Harley... This is him:

Enough talk now, time to take a look at Jenn's awesome Journaling cards:

Don't you just LOVE them?
And this is what Jenn had in mind:

I recently went to a crop and got a whole bunch of pocket scrapbooking
layouts done. It was a wicked fun time! I also realized how fun it would
be to create some custom cards perfect for my layouts. Every layout my
handsome kitty mister Harley made an appearance, so I thought "why not
make some cards unique to him?" The kitty in the "your view" set is
perfect to color like any kitty.

I started by stamping the kitty in versafine smokey gray on Distress
watercolor paper. I then smeared some of my distress inks ( black soot
and tattered rose) on an acrylic block. This is now my paint palette
where I watercolored the kitty to look like Mister Harley. Confession: I
do ad a bit more black, since he is so white because I think it helps
the image stand out better! Once I colored a few of these I fussy cut
them out and then used them as embellishments on the pocket scrapbooking
cards!

Be sure to use a permanent ink when watercoloring. My favorite is
Versafine.
If your image gets too wet, zap it with your heat tool so your colors
won't feather and bleed. I did this before coloring his ears and nose
pink.
You can omit part of a stamp by just inking what you want as I did with
the speech bubble- adding in "Hello" instead.